Catch 22
by 1shot
Summary: He holds her while she mourns him. The irony is not lost on her. Rose Tyler & 10.5; post-Journey's End.


CATCH-22

On the sixth day, she comes home to find all of her cutlery in some sort of sculpture on the kitchen table. Forks, knives, spoons, a serving ladle - they sparkle and shine, edges cold and dangerous. She is not certain what to make of it; she pauses in the doorway, staring, and closes her fingers tightly around the woven clasp of her handbag. She looks for secret shapes; she traces metal lines with her eyes, seeking alien meanings, the writings of some unknown language formed from stainless steel and bent tines. Moments later, it occurs to her to notice the tidy counter and spotless floor, and she realizes that the hidden message lies in the empty sink: he has done the dishes.

Rose walks into the living room, setting down her bag and draping her coat over the back of the couch. She knows already that he isn't here; there is too much silence in the empty air of her flat. Brown eyes skim the walls as she wonders if anything else will have changed. Her toaster, she is certain, is now 'sonic' - and she does not recall the stereo having quite so many knobs.

It doesn't bother her. Many things do, of course, but she cannot take the time to worry about the niceties of space and place - she does not care to preserve the integrity of half-empty rooms. She wonders if he is simply bored, or if he is really trying to create some sense of 'home'. Her walls are vacant. Nothing she cares about is here; a week ago, she hadn't intended to come back. Years spent in a supposedly temporary universe; she never accumulated much.

She wonders if they should get a puppy.

She wonders if that's what people do when they settle down. She's forgotten. She remembers his allergy to mortgages, to stability - and, really, she hasn't decided yet. Not at all. She wishes momentarily for more clutter, so there would be something to throw - but she sort of likes the strange fork tower, and nothing else strikes her as providing sufficient satisfaction.

She goes back into the kitchen and pulls down a box of pasta from the cupboard. He is never gone long. He is always hungry. Trying not to make too little, she sets the pot overflowing instead, and mops up the boiling mess with shaking hands, careful not to burn herself.

.

He is cheerful. He talks constantly. Long ago, she mastered the art of tuning him out, keeping to her own thoughts and picking up the important words here and there - but she listens now, constantly, weighing and measuring every sentence, every story. She has noticed the change in his accent, and the reminder scrapes across her skin. Each half-twisted vowel reminds her that he is different; that she has settled, somehow, or had settlement forced on her. That he is not the same. She does her best not to flinch when he touches her, and he does his best not to notice.

He is cheerful yet. His cheerfulness is a lie, and she knows this too; she long ago mastered the art of reading his eyes, of catching the slight edge of tension in his voice and the way his hands, when he is upset, go terribly still. These things are the same. When his words falter, she reaches for his fingers and says nothing, in turn; her grasps are momentary, but she can see the lines of his shoulders straighten a little. She does her best not to hurt him - or give him hope.

She slid her tongue down his throat, there on the beach, with the wind in her hair and a great chasm ripping somewhere in her chest, but impulse was not decision. The final call was taken from her.

.

On the eighth day, he comes straggling in with a wide smile, ripped trousers and a skinned knee, because he borrowed some boy's skateboard and his centre of gravity is not quite what he remembered from the last time, on Bentarian IV. Or rather, he informs her, gravity itself is different - but hedges everywhere are very much the same.

There is something lost in his eyes when he runs his fingertip over those little beads of drying blood. His tongue flicks the back of his teeth.

She gets a bandage from the medicine cabinet and sponges off his leg, gently, very gently. "You don't regenerate now," she reminds him, although obviously he knows it. Obviously it doesn't need saying. She takes a breath - and then she is not so gentle with the bandage, and downright rough when she kisses him, her hand wound through the back of his hair and her knees on the cold bathroom tile.

His arms are too quick, too desperate around her. He tastes the same, but he's warm; she remembers cool alien flesh.

She does not speak to him for two days after that. In apology, he bends all the forks back into shape and even does the shopping: some hairpins, a dragonfruit, a jar of strawberry jam.

.

The Doctor is not meant for jobs. Credit cards. Bills and errands and coffee cooler gossip. He did not watch Big Brother last night; he doesn't want to discuss it, no, although there was this one time on a space station in the future, not _this _future but a parallel - he is not good in an office.

Torchwood wants him, of course; Torchwood will give him anything he asks for. The Doctor and Rose Tyler - even here, now, they are known, they are catered to and danced around and eyed askance in the hallways. It doesn't hurt, she knows, that her sort-of-father is also billionaire-in-charge.

The Doctor is given top security clearance, and access to the vaults. He comes and goes. She does not ask him what he is doing, but she smiles once, when she finds a noticeably altered screwdriver in pieces on the coffee table.

When he asks her what _she_ is working on, she murmurs, "Dimensional travel division," and turns away before she can see his face change.

It is a lost cause anyway, she suspects. Once again, she has sealed her own prison.

.

She is too old for this. Not even twenty-five, and ancient; she is too old, and too broken, and too furiously angry. There are moments when she shakes with rage. She pours tea, and watches it fill the cup; watches it overflow, spread across the counter, a slow flood of brown heat dripping on the floor. The pot trembles in her hand, but it isn't until she tastes the salt wetness on her lips that she realizes she is crying.

Somewhere out there, he is lost among the stars, with no one to hold his hand. And she has already broken all the laws of the universe once; he is too far away for her to find him a second time.

His arms are around her; he takes the tea away, and wraps her in his long, skinny bones. He holds her while she mourns him. The irony is not lost on her. The Doctor's skin smells of sage, and dust, and some otherworldly spice she has never been able to name.

"This is_ bollocks_," she says, and slams her fist too hard into his chest. She has to be more careful. He is missing a pulse, beneath those ribs.

The way he rocks her is exactly the same. But in the dark, he does things to her that the other Doctor never, ever did before.

.

"If he had died," he says to her in the third month, quite suddenly, "that other me - if he had _died_, you wouldn't doubt that this was me. Who I am." He sets down the bits of wire he is tinkering with, and he stares at her. His corner of the living room is overgrown with strange parts - lights, wings, smooth lines of metal. 'Sculptor,' she told a nosy deliveryman, not too long ago.

Now she looks at him, hopeless - he has caught her checking her e-mail, her fingers resting lightly on the laptop's keyboard. The glow of the monitor highlights the shadows under her eyes.

There is a long pause. He suspects he has made a mistake.

"There was no proper choice," she tells him then, quietly. The toes of her bare feet curl into the edge of her chair.

He blinks, once, and looks down, away from the desolation of her careful regard. She does understand, after all, and that leaves him with nothing left to say.

It is a hole that lasts for all of five minutes; then he starts to tell her a long story about the cactus people of Neburmol, and she asks him, amiably enough, to shut it.

.

It is not easy for him, either, and she knows it. A man who traveled the whole of time and space - a man who is not meant for jobs - is also not meant for a small Cardiff flat and constant reminders about cleaning the coffee pot and lowering the toilet seat. She is tolerant when he fills her spaces with dribs and drabs of odd flotsam; most of it is Torchwood tech, she knows, although she has her doubts about the rising tower of empty juice boxes. She is tolerant, too, when he holds her too hard - when he curls himself around her and shivers, when his fingertips leave bruises on her wrists.

He is a man who once had the TARDIS in his head.

Now he is trapped - it is something new they have in common. Once it was the adventure, the breathless delight; now it is the feeling of walls, closing around. Walls of a universe, walls of a dull highrise. Walls of domesticity, and of the future - seconds ticking by, grown suddenly precious, immovable and irretrievable. He presses his ear to her chest, and counts her heartbeats as they pass. He measures them against his own.

"I'm sorry," she tells him, stroking her fingertips through the mess of his hair.

"I've you," he says.

And somewhere lost forever is another man who whirls through the universe, free - without her. Cold and grieving.

"No proper choice for anyone," she breathes, soft mourning - but he raises his head, and she kisses him, drawing her fingers down the thinness of his spine. He has death in him - an empire screaming - but so does she. She is the bad wolf, and when her teeth close on his lip she wonders how she is meant to soothe the violence from him. She is no longer innocent.

.

He comes to Sunday dinners at her parents'. She goes with him to each odd town he wants to visit; she follows him down every tiny path, every time he takes her hand. She takes him shopping, buys him new suits; he drags her down to some indie rock concert in the sewers. She admires his ability to find adventure in broken flowers and vanished balloons.

She doesn't learn how to laugh again until the cactus people of Neburmol nearly destroy the Tower of London - until she is gasping and breathless, her massive gun heavy across her shoulders and blood running hot into her eyes. He comes to her with drywall plastered into his hair, and when he grasps her arm she nearly decks him from reflex. Then they are wrapped around each other, hard and close, not caring in the least that anyone is watching (the Doctor and Rose Tyler - everyone knows that, anyway). As he whispers his relief into her ear, she can only wrap her fingers in his tattered coat and breathe. For a moment, she is purely delighted. She remembers that something matters, after all.

His arms tighten just before he releases her and steps back, touching a fingertip to her crimson forehead. "You can't regenerate, either," he points out.

But he sees the look on her face, and he smiles, anyway. His madcap, little-boy grin.

.

"There was a ship," he says, bursting through the door of the flat. Nine months in, this new life, but still no birth of decoration on the walls, although she hasn't removed the single spoon he hung from the curtain rod in the living room. She is sitting on the formless couch, which she suspects he has modified in some fashion. It has a habit of shifting at odd moments.

Rose looks up from her book. "Yeah?" Blank and careful.

"Neburmol," he says, breathless - he sets his hands on his knees, and doubles over for a while, because he is not quite who he was and there are a lot of stairs. "Neburmol," he repeats. "A ship. They've found most of it. I can - I've seen it. I think we can -"

He can't speak. "I got you a mobile," she murmurs, to remind him - but he waves a hand, impatient, and she knows that he wanted to tell her in person. She puts the book on the table, and does not allow herself to hope. "Is there -"

"Enough," he says. "Maybe. I mean, with what I've been - we could limp along, at least, and just to get to the markets on Altera - or Barcelona. The planet, not -"

"- the city," she completes for him, and then she is silent.

He straightens; he scrubs a hand through his hair, and takes a step toward the couch. The door is still open behind him, the light from the hallway illuminating his tall form. "It would take a while," he says, spreading his hands. "A year, probably, even _after_ I fix - and it's not the TARDIS." He barely stumbles over the name. She wonders if the other ever stumbles over hers the same way. "But there'll be more, in the markets, much more than Torchwood has, and..."

"They won't just let you go," she says, gently, and she sees his face fall. "_Us_, I mean," she corrects, before the destruction really registers in his eyes, and she is satisfied when he brightens again. Mercurial. Immediate. A galaxy shining in his gaze.

"We'll manage," he assures her. "I can - we'll manage. If you'll ... if you're sure." He licks his lips, briefly, and adds, diffident, "If you want."

She makes him suffer, for a little while, because she cannot understand how he could possibly expect her to hesitate. She skims her gaze slowly along the empty walls of the flat, to make her point. He bounces impatient, nervous, on the balls of his feet.

She picks up some bit of curving metal from the edge of the couch cushions, and tosses it toward the pile in the corner. It makes a small, ringing sound. "Or we could get a puppy," she suggests.

He knows - of course he knows - that she is not serious, but he's staring at her anyway. Wanting something. "It's... it won't be dimensional," he tells her, suddenly quiet. "I still don't know how to do that. Truly."

Oh.

She closes her eyes, and somewhere in the dark of her mind, she sees a blue police box twirling in space. She sees the Doctor, agonized and alone - then, lifting her lashes, she sees the Doctor. Agonized and alone.

Rose sighs, long and slow, because there are some things in the universe (in two universes) she cannot fix, cannot change even with a Time Lord by her side.

But there are some things, too, that she can - so she rises, and holds out her hands.


End file.
